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No. Although the ancient Romans had books, they were very different form the books of today. Our present day books are of the codex form while the Romans used scrolls for their books.

It depends on what period you mean. Romans invented the codex.

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12y ago

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Yes, the Romans had thousands of books. These were not only stored in vast public libraries, with usually separate sections for Latin and Greek works, but private citizens also had their personal libraries, as found in the ruins of Herculaneum. However the Roman books were not in the present day form. They were in scrolls and if the book were a long one, say the length of the Iliad, they were written on several scrolls similar to our chapters and they were stored together in leather buckets. They also had I.D. tags affixed to the ends of the scrolls to identify the "chapter" of the book.

The Romans also pioneered the bound book, which they called codex. They first appeared in the 1st century BC in the form of folded parchment notebooks. These evolved into larger bodies of folded parchment or papyrus with more elaborate forms of binding. The codex became as numerous as the scrolls by 300 AD and completely replaced it by the 6th century AD.

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12y ago
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Well they didnt have books but they did write on wax

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15y ago
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They had stuff called papyrus, which is a kind of reed/plant. Students at school generally used a slate to write on, but in work environments, and higher authority jobs, papyrus was used.

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9y ago
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Books had not been invented - they had scrolls on which were written stories, poems, plays, laws,

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7y ago
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Yes, they had large libraries both public and private. Their books, however, were in the form of scrolls which were unrolled as a person read.

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Wiki User

14y ago
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